Posts by Jason Hindle

That headline....

Thank you. Just thank you.

It’s all a conspiracy

Perhaps it’s all a big conspiracy of the MSM or whatever. Probably fake news. SAD! Or perhaps his children are (shudder) SJWs. Or maybe snowflakes are virtue signalling* with their own dark Zionist agenda in league with the Deep State (and possibly aliens or lizard people**).

* Yes, I jest. Besides, I prefer virtual signalling to twat signalling.

** An alien anal probing might explain Dad?

I like Windows 10

And, as I believe I’ve written here before, every time I start to think my current Mac might be my last*, Microsoft goes and does something monumentally stupid.

* And let’s face it, Apple doesn’t always shower themselves in glory when it comes to finding major bugs before release.

So Essential essentially a US Wiley Fox?

Trading on Rubin’s name?

I expect Acer, Asus and HP will run with the overall idea

Once Android apps run well on Chrome OS (they seem to be getting there), and the tablet mode of Chrome OS starts to look like a tablet (that too is getting there), then others will run with this. Google, OTOH are trying to compete with Surface when they can’t even compete with the iPad. The base iPad is more capable than the entry level slate (as is the Surface Go) and thst’s before you take the ecosystem into consideration.

In the meantime, Google needs to take the person who who answered “How do we compete with Apple,” with “Something with a Celeron in it” out back.....

I had high hopes for the Slate

It disappoints. Looks like Google have sacrificed the processor, in the base model, in favour of other high end components (e.g. the screen). Both the base iPad and Surface Go offer a better balance of performance and function. Then there's the photos of the slate with its keyboard. No kickstand? I expect to see more useful devices from Google's partners. Android on tablet is dead, so Google needs to make this work if they want to stay in the tablet market.

If true, then someone in China has made a very big mistake

Because you can wave goodbye to any kind of Chinese hi tech export industry. Which is why it all sounds a bit unlikely to me. The aspersions alone could serve to make China a little poorer.

I’ve had good results from Google

It usually has me navigating on foot, like a local*.

* Ok, that would be the local goofy foreigner, who doesn’t speak the language, and is constantly looking at his damned phone.

Gave it a try today

Slick but also a reminder why I avoid Ubuntu. Problems with the latest/greatest? Well... Wouldn't ssh or https to anything while connected to the office via Openconnect. Odd really, because I was able to ssh from the corporate Dell to my shiny new Ubuntu VM. A colleague with deep knowledge of ssh helped me with the former. I'm still looking at the latter. I never have these problems with Mint and CENTOS. I've also spun up a Mint VM under Hyper-V, but that takes a little more effort (had to tell it what screen resolution to use, and copy/paste won't work between it and Windows, unlike a VirtualBox resident).

Also, Hyper-V isn't necessarily better than VirtualBox. Whereas Virtualbox sees your monitor as its monitor, connection to a Hyper-V is via Remote Desktop/X (the only way is headless, it seems). Overall performance is better, but graphic performance is a little sluggish. Good to muck around with these things.

I would certainly miss the unfettered data usage

When I'm out and about with my camera, in Europe, I like to be able to frequently upload photos from my camera to my phone, and then onto Lightroom in the cloud. If I have the big Sony camera with me, that means I'm shunting a lot of data around. Of course, local SIM cards are readily available and I'm perfectly happy to go back to doing things that way.

So, I think the reintroduction of roaming charges (or simply making my data allowance unusable, as I've found Three are quite good at) would disproportionately affect those who don't have the gumption to find cheaper alternatives. In other words, mostly the very people who voted for this.

Microsoft's quest to own work

I'm struggling to find a link, but her premise of a cogent article I recently read is that Microsoft is on a quest to own work. They own the social network of work, the office tools most people use at work and home, the development tools used by a great many programmers and now they own the place where a lot of the source code goes, and everything can be done in Microsoft's cloud. Any consumer/lifestyle play, by Microsoft, is going to spring out of this setup. Like them or loathe them, Microsoft as has a lot to leverage when it comes to creating and selling (hypothetical) shiny new things.

Good luck

The weekly On Call has been a reliable laugh, so best of luck with what comes next.

There are a lot of sub £200 Windows Tablets out there

Made in China. It would be interesting to see what proportion of the growth in shipments comes from these.

It’s an expensive way to run Office

When you factor in the cost of the pretty much mandatory keyboard.

So it's just the (none pro) Surface 3 with slightly better processor?

Paint me unimpressed. Also.... This obsession with the Surface form factor... It's crap for using on public transport (unless you're in love with the on screen keyboard). Then there's the app store. I think Windows 10S is a fine idea in principle, but what percentage of buyers can survive entirely on the contents of Microsoft's app store?

Edit: Oh, and the usual promise of an LTE version, for later, that will doubtless be as rare as rocking horse shit.

I have a lot of time for Public Health England, and the NHS

In some ways they're the greatest users of big data. However, I do sometimes get the impression the fanatics are running the asylum. Who remembers the pronouncement of ten a day (which surely would have turned us all Vegan)?

I've read a couple of reviews of Windows on ARM

They're quite mixed. I'd probably avoid the first iteration (but when was that not true?) and perhaps wait for more of the software (especially Office, it seems) to be natively compiled to the new processor. It's a compelling idea, but the devil is in the implementation.

There’s a lot of problems

I had to spend a little time in Out Patients, at a hospital last year. A few days later, I received a copy of a letter from the consultant, addressed to my GP. Being in the same business as your average El Reg reader, and therefore being a picky bastard, I did of course check with said GP who was delighted with the letter I handed to her!

To say the NHS is in a bit of a mess would be the understatement of the century. As far as I can tell, it’s mostly down to whichever government.

The Sandler comparison

Is surely insulting to our new AI overlords?

Remind me... What is Essential’s USP

And when was the last time a proprietary peripheral port succeeded in a mass market product?